Cotard's syndrome is a belief that you're dead. It's cause by brain lessions that sepperate the sense of self from the experiance of the world. The result is that the world the sufferer sees no longer seems real, their body included, and so the most common conclussion is that they are dead. They are in hell as a spirit, or that their body is decomposing.
I'm trying to write a comic scrip at the momnbet, and the basic premise revolves around the idea that a person has cotard's syndrome, they no longer pecive the world as real, but instead of assuming they are dead, they come to the understanding that the world is dead. That human experiance the world in a way so as to put a skien of existences over the nothingness that underpins the world. He's had the delusion from birth and so he never had the socialisation that led him to assume he was dead in the smae way other sufferers had.
This might end up as a book rather than a comic. Who knows. Maybe my dissertaion.
But his dellusion is deluded, that's the way the world is, arguably, it's just humans can't look past the skien of reality. I think there are bhudest principles around this. My character isn't enligntened. It isn't a gift or a superpower. But it makes him important.
It does mean that ideas are as real as humans, or chairs, or whatever (becuase nothing is real, it's all a level playing fireld) but they have no phisical presence on the skien, they exist slightly above it. Or beside it.
Except they do have a presence, in art. In stories. They are the phisical bodies of ideas.
This might have to be in a novel. Bugger. I wanted to write a comic. Maybe I should do something else for the comic? Maybe my first abortive novel? That worked horribly as a novel. Might work well as a comic.
